Gigabyte GV-NX78T256V-B 7800GT Video Card Review :: The Card

Gigabyte Gigabyte GV-NX78T256V-B 7800GT
Brand	Gigabyte
Model	GV-NX78T256V-B 7800GT
Graphics Chip	G70
Graphics Memory Type	DDR3
Memory (MB)	256
Graphics Core Clock (MHz)	400
Memory Clock (MHz)	1000
Memory Speed (ns)	2
RAMDAC Frequency (MHz)	Dual 400
Active Cooling on Graphics Chip	Yes
Heatsink on Memory	Yes
Video Capture	Yes
Ports
Dual Monitor Support	Yes
VGA Out	DVI-I, DVI-I
Video In and Out	TV Out, S-Video Out
Package and Support
Printed Manual	Yes
Driver CD	Yes
Performance Tool Software	SmartDoctor
Major Games	SpellForce, Xpand Rally
Major Software	PowerDirector 3ME
VR Glasses	No
DVD Player Software	PowerDVD 5.0
Video Recording Software	PowerDirector

In many respects, the 7800GT from GIGABYTE is similar to NVIDIA's reference 7800GT. The fan on the front of the PCB is a 12-fin radial fan. The heatsink surrounding the fan covers the majority of the rest of the front of the PCB. The heat sink covers the memory chips, keeping both the graphics core and the memory cooled effectively. The length of the 7800GT is about the same as a 6800GT card. One nice thing about the 7800 cards is the single slot cooling. ATI's latest and the 6800 Ultra both require two slots.

Cooling

Cooling Fan

GIGABYTE decided to clock the core at 400MHz and the memory at 1GHz, the same clock as the NVIDIA reference card clock. The 7800GT has 20 pixel pipelines, with 16 ROPs (pixel outputs). This gives the 7800GT a fillrate of 8 Gigatexels and a pixel fillrate of 6.4 Gigapixels. The memory bandwidth of the 7800GT is 32GB/second. The 7800GT has 2ns GDDR-3 memory, meaning GIGABTYE clocked the card at the rated speed of the memory. The memory bus on the 7800GT is 256-bit.

The 7800GT is a native PCI Express card. PCI Express is a serial point to point protocol offering up to 250MB a second bandwidth per lane. Modern motherboards have one or more x16 slots, offering 8GB total bandwidth a second via the PCI Express bus. Early NVIDIA PCI Express video cards needed a HSI (High Speed Interconnect) bridge to work with PCI Express, as the cards were designed for AGP. The 7800GT does not need this bridge chip.

IO

PCI Express connector

Input and Output ports on the GIGABYTE 7800GT are typical of video cards today. GIGABYTE includes two DVI-I ports allowing the purchaser to attach two LCD monitors with DVI connectors, two CRT monitors with the included adapters, or a LCD and CRT monitor. NVIDIA based video cards use a utility called nView to control multiple monitors. GIGABYTE also includes a VIVO port for Video In / Video Out options.

Discuss This Article